The Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) and the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) have announced plans to inject ₦6 billion into the economy through the free registration of 250,000 youth-led businesses across the country.
The initiative, recently launched, aims to empower young Nigerians engaged in small trading, content creation, and emerging enterprises by helping them transition from informal to formally registered businesses. The move is expected to boost entrepreneurship, create jobs, and expand access to government and private-sector funding opportunities.
Speaking in Kaduna during a courtesy visit by the Association of Northern Nigerian Students, the Registrar-General of the CAC, Hussaini Ishaq Magaji, encouraged youths to take advantage of the opportunity. He described the collaboration with SMEDAN as a major intervention to strengthen the micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSME) sector and reduce unemployment.
According to Magaji, formalizing youth-owned businesses will enable more young entrepreneurs to participate meaningfully in Nigeria’s economy and access government-backed empowerment and funding initiatives.
Meanwhile, the CAC is enhancing its operations with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to speed up service delivery and clear a backlog of over 7,000 pending registration applications. The new system, introduced earlier this year, is designed to process thousands of requests daily, read and sort customer emails, detect duplicate submissions, and route issues to the right departments.
Although the AI-driven registration portal initially faced technical challenges, such as payment and document upload delays, the CAC says it now processes over 11,000 transactions daily. The commission believes that automation will further improve efficiency and make business registration faster and more transparent.
For young entrepreneurs, the free registration initiative and the CAC’s digital transformation represent a major step toward a more inclusive and supportive business environment, promising easier access to markets, funding, and long-term sustainability.